For the opening two sets, Goffin’s performance had been about as flat as the landscape, and it looked as though Edmund was moving in on what would have been one of the greatest upsets in the history of Davis Cup finals, if not the greatest.
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Twenty-year-old Kyle Edmund from Yorkshire had never played a Davis Cup tie before.
Yet for two glorious sets mission impossible seemed highly probable.
After surviving a 12-minute opening game, Edmund produced a stunning display of power tennis, particularly with his whipped forehand, to put the pressure-laden Goffin in all sorts of trouble. He broke Edmund in the third game when the Brit sent his forehand wide, and again in the fifth game to build a 4-1 advantage.
But it was only Edmund’s sixth best-of-five-set match, and only once had he actually played more than three sets, when he won the only grand slam victory of his career against Stephane Robert at the French Open this summer.
“I wasn’t aware I’d been given the first warning”, he explained. After a countdown, the curtains then dropped to the clay, to reveal that the players and captains were already on the court, along with a troupe of barefoot dancers on the baseline and a keyboardist outside the tramlines. Goffin’s a top-quality player when he plays well. Edmund, visibly cramping up, only had enough left in the tank to eke out three further games before Belgium had their first point on the board, by a 6-3, 6-1, 2-6, 1-6, 0-6 scoreline.
In time, the 20-year-old will go on to appreciate what he did here as a significant staging post in his development.
Edmund reeled off six games in a row to win the second set but many a tennis match has turned on a sixpence over the years and this one was about to be added to the list. Only a tenth of the 13,000 crowd in the Flanders Expo arena were from Britain, but there were long periods on Friday when they accounted for more than half the noise. “I didn’t think they crossed the line, to be honest”, he said.
“I believe in me and Jamie as a doubles team”, Murray said. Quality, home crowd and experience prevailed in the end, giving us an interesting first rubber in the Davis Cup final despite Murray being the clear favorite versus Bemelmans in the second rubber.
“I knew if Kyle was playing like this, bravo, but if there was a small chance I had to take it”.
The shell-shocked world No. 16 gave up two breakpoints in the second set with double faults against the world No.100. “That’s not the way you want it to happen”. Obviously he will be devastated that he could not convert his position, and will probably feel he has let the team down, but he should not have that attitude.
A key part of Edmund’s modus operandi was to deny his altered circumstances. “I didn’t feel like we should get any warning or discussion about the public”.
“It couldn’t have gone any better”.
There was the first – and not last – delay to carry out running repairs on the net afer the third set but Goffin continued his momentum as Edmund flagged. In the fourth set I was struggling physically, and in the fifth set.
“My legs just started to get exhausted”. So when I lost the point, I just went up and asked the umpire why.
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“It was hard for me to find my timing”.
